mike_toscano writes: "At least some of us have recently seen Linus' most recent comments on his experience with Gnome 3 — he didn't have many nice things to say about it and as you know, he's not the only one. On the other hand, there have been some great reviews and comparisons of KDE with the other options (like this one) lately. Sure, early releases of 4.x were painful but the desktop today is fully-functional and polished.

So the question: To those who run *nix desktops and are frustrated by the latest Gnome variants, why aren't you running KDE?

To clarify, I'm not asking which desktop is better. I'm really talking to the people who have already decided they don't like the new Gnome & Unity but aren't using KDE."Link to Original Source

Because I run fluxbox- KDE runs a load of crap in the background, which is one of the basic reasons I gave up Windows looooooooong ago.

On fluxbox (and openbox, and blackbox) everything has been customizable for years now (key+click combinations etc, window layouts) which makes it ideal for applications that demand lots of hotkeys. Okay, it might not be flashy and 3D accelerated (unless you really try to make it so) but who cares: the memory footprint of the whole window manager is negligible.